Sometimes two campaigns that I care about a lot pick the same day to hold an awareness-raising drive. It happened again on Tuesday.

The one I took part in was advertising the Stop ACTA London Protest on Sat 11 Feb. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (#ACTA) is a plurilateral international agreement on enforcement of so-called “intellectual property rights” – copyrights, trademarks and so on. It’ll have major implications for freedom of expression, access to culture and privacy. It will also harm international trade and stifle cooperation. (More background at EDRI or a fairly large AJE page – thanks to Occupy Bristol for the AJE link.)

So the one I didn’t support at the time was the Move Your Money UK launch day. That’s a great idea too, suggesting that if we, the 99%, are actually unhappy with the big banks and their titled leaders, we should move as much as possible out of those banks and into financial institutions that we control. As you might expect for someone whose first memory of mutuals is a trust account at the local building society, I support that too. I still have building society accounts, as well as banking with the co-op bank and recently joining my local credit union. I’ve moved my money. Why don’t you?

I didn’t try to support both campaigns simultaneously on social networks because I thought it would reduce the number of people who saw my message. I backed the ACTA protest because a lot of my networks were already discussing Move Your Money and I thought Stop ACTA would benefit more. Was that the right decision? Who can tell? What would you have done?

I started buying from o2 in December. I was using Three, but their network where I stay in Norfolk isn’t reliable and you can’t just buy a device in a shop for The Phone Co-op. The dongle from o2 is a recent Huawei USB device that just worked in debian and was fairly easy for me to get working in Ubuntu. There’s space in it for a memory card, so maybe I could boot from it… but that’s an idea for later.

The o2 deal is OK but not great, and the included wifi is nowhere near as good as it looked: when it says it includes “BT Openzone” that doesn’t include any of the “BT Openzone-H” hotspots that are much more common. You’re only allowed to register one device for wifi, so no using your phone, tablet and laptop at different times!

I can’t believe it’s legal to advertise that as “unlimited wifi”, but o2 is still a better offer than access to “BT Openzone-H” hotspots at £39/month (yes, that’s the price for wifi-only…).

Ultimately, I think the problem is that there’s a rubbish choice of mobile (wifi or 3G) internet access providers in the UK. It’s a completely and utterly failed market, so you need to use Virtual Private Networks and similar tricks to protect yourself from the dysfunctional networks. My VPN meant my mobile number was safe: how about yours?

As luck would have it, I had already proposed a resolution about protecting customer privacy to The Phone Co-op (affiliate link) for our AGM on Saturday 4 February (if you’re a member, let me know). We were trying to find a compromise wording and I don’t think this little o2 scandal has hurt my proposal at all!

At least the phone co-op’s mobile service is based on Orange’s network, which wasn’t affected. How does your network perform? There’s an Internet Service Provider evilness test which might tell you.

Once again, some websites have taken themselves offline and caused great inconvenience to their supporters.

This is really annoying. Protesting about threats to take websites offline by taking websites offline is as stupid as protesting against a ban on kissing by not kissing. It just demonstrates that you can do without your websites/kisses if you must.

I feel it’s much better to use websites to distribute information and call people to action, like this epetition for UK citizens and residents, or by asking your associations and suppliers to oppose these measures and their supporters.

Wikipedia is probably a bit to blame. Although it called its action a blackout, it wasn’t one and there were still many ways to access its information. In fact, if you use NoScript, the banner didn’t even display and there’s only a line on the front page to say anything is happening.

The one that really annoyed me was identi.ca, which even turned off its API so clients just started spewing errors everywhere (I returned to my desk to a stack of retry questions). That stopped some of my websites from distributing a link to the anti-SOPA epetition because they read from my identi.ca stream – how much other anti-SOPA activism was hindered?

I’ve been told that Evan held a vote, but I didn’t see it, so I didn’t vote and I don’t know the turnout or anything. How many people voted for the blackout because they use other sites like twitter more anyway?

There were also some great workshops – I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) – and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems.

The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I’m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

The RISE co-op is the sole shareholder in the Social Enterprise Mark CIC and its members have been called to an Extraordinary General Meeting during the lunch break of next Tuesday’s “Knowing and Growing” conference at UWE Bristol. The RISE board has proposed Four Special Resolutions that would dissolve the co-op and transfer all assets to the SEM CIC and a trust, ignoring RISE Ltd’s Memorandum of Association. software.coop is calling on other RISE members to attend the EGM and oppose this demutualisation attempt.

RISE is constituted as a common ownership co-op and its Memorandum of Association contains a pre-CIC type of asset lock, which directs the assets to be transferred to another common ownership social enterprise organisation if the co-operative is dissolved. However, unlike the CIC asset lock, there is no independent regulator enforcing it, so an EGM could possibly remove that lock. Also, unlike in many co-ops, there has been no requirement for new members to pledge to obey the RISE asset lock at an individual level and there has been no member education about common ownership in the last three years.

This demutualisation is the wrong solution for RISE because:

there are social enterprises which do comply with the asset lock that could really benefit from the legacy at this time of budget cuts;

the EGM is the day after the global launch of the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives, which is about promoting mutualism around the world and the RISE co-operative should support this;

many RISE members are mutuals, including the world’s largest consumer co-operative and demutualisation would be embarassing to them;

demutualisation should be discussed seriously, through a proper democratic process before the regular Annual General Meeting, not sprung from the board to members in a short meeting during the lunch break of another event;

the proposal has not been published on RISE’s website or email newsletter;

appointing the former directors of a dissolved co-op as trustees without member oversight seems unlikely to secure the assets in the long term.

software.coop will vote against the demutualisation, in favour of social enterprise, and calls on other RISE members to show solidarity with the co-operative and common ownership social enterprise movements.

“This could be a feature deserving of the name, as long as the user is able to authorize the programs she wants to use, so she can run free software written and modified by herself or people she trusts. However, we are concerned that Microsoft and hardware manufacturers will implement these boot restrictions in a way that will prevent users from booting anything other than Windows.”

Our co-op has put in a bid to bring KohaCon to Edinburgh in 2012. Edinburgh is a great Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference city, with libraries of national and international importance, a huge choice of hotels, restaurants and entertainments and good international transport links.

I’m listening to quite a few podcasts recently. Here are my current favourites:

Cyberunions which covers the tech/work crossover space and is appearing as Ogg near the start of most weeks. I reviewed an earlier episode and it’s kept on improving. It’s under CC-BY-NC-SA, so you can share it, but it isn’t free software (FOSS) itself. Thanks to John Atherton for the tip.

The Command Line is more tech, but with a leaning towards activism too. This podcast is actually FOSS – sadly the only one of this round-up! It’s recently dropped to once a week on Sundays, which is a shame in one way, but suits me better. I don’t remember how I got started on this.

More or Less: Behind the Stats is about numbers in the news. Maybe my love of statistics influences me, but I think this is brilliant, puncturing the pompous politicians who try to mislead (figures don’t lie, but liars do figure). Imagine the FactCheck Blog with its own show and a sense of humour. It’s just gone on a break, but there’s plenty of recent episodes to catch up on.

So tired, but so happy. Well worth it as a day out. Yesterday I went to the Tour of Britain as it passed through Cheddar Gorge. It was a fairly social trip, riding along with two from Bristol on the way in (hope they got back OK – one bike broke crossing the orchard at Sandford, but I showed them Cheddar Cycle Store) and one from Milton on the way back.

When I got there, I rode up the Gorge until I had to stop (or else fall off) and it was still packed with fans. It was a good half-hour before the race would pass by, but already almost every flattish piece of land by the road had either a spectator or a bicycle on it. I watched twitter for race news, posted an update @mjray, then put the phone away as the green-fronted police bikes came through just ahead of the racers. I tried videoing the race, but it’s only the second outing for the handlebarcam and I seem to have deleted the recording before hooking it up to the laptop. Thankfully, the itv4 coverage (repeated 13:00) is pretty good. (My back is on TV! Ahem.)

Now, today (Saturday) I will be mostly doing the work scheduled for Friday, but it was still worth it. Go along if you get the chance: Suffolk and Norfolk today, Westminster tomorrow. I suggested it to @enterprisehub’s #coopsweekend because the Rabobank team are doing well.